It's time to set the record straight. There are, in fact, two ways to say the name of this planet. There is the widely-known yur-RAY-nus and the lesser-known (but far less prone to having jokes cracked about it) YUR-rah-nus, which is the more popular amongst planetary astronomers. Uranus is probably best known for the crude jokes referring to its name. Other than that, all that most people know about this planet is that it comes after Saturn. Uranus is a completely unique world in its own right, with some attributes that have never been found in another planet.
Uranus By the Numbers
The planet Uranus has a diameter of nearly 32,000 miles, or a little over four Earth diameters. It orbits at around 1.8 billion miles from the Sun (this is about 20 times as far from the Sun as Earth and over twice as far from the Sun as Saturn, the next planet in towards the Sun). At such a large distance, it takes Uranus over 84 Earth years to make one circuit around the Sun.
Being a gas giant like all of the outer planets, Uranus is mostly made up of gas. What is odd about Uranus, however, is that its winds are so strong that its outer layers have a shorter day than the inner part of the planet. At certain points in the outer layers a gas particle makes a circuit around the planet in 14 hours, while the inner part of the planet takes over 17 hours to rotate around the planet once.
